New Studies Show Facebook Benefits to Local Business

Some new studies came out over the last little while talking about the benefits of using Facebook, how it effects customer loyalty and the truthfulness of online profiles.

I first found the studies at the Social Media Examiner, a great site and I recommend you drop by and check it out.

The first study put out by Neilsen Company talks about the time invested by users into Facebook.

The answer? 7 HOURS PER MONTH, just so you know Google users only spend about 2 hours on the site per month. Compare that to television at 144 hours per month. Yikes!

This came as no surprise but people like to share things on Facebook, this makes the site incredibly viral. In fact Facebookers like to share more than other Social Networkers from other sites. You can read more detail on that at TechCrunch.

Originally, I was going to write about the fact the Facebook has overtaken Yahoo in traffic, BUT, it looks like there’s bigger news to be had. Facebook overtook Google in Traffic the first week of this month(March). That makes Facebook the most trafficked site in the US. You can read about that here.

Another interesting study showed people tend to be more honest about themselves on Facebook with their profiles. This means you’re getting the real person not some idealized avatar of a person. This also means you can target your market easier since they have been more honest about themselves. You can read about that in more detail here.

This last study conducted by Harvard Business Review gives me mixed feelings. I know I’m such a deep person to have feelings about a market study.

Anyhoo, the study showed that Facebook fans of a company in this case a Cafe chain, are more loyal, spend more and are, well, better fans of the company. Which probably explains why they became fans on Facebook. But here’s the kicker out of the 13270 customers emailed and invited to join the page only 2.1% became Fans after 3 months of effort.

That’s a really low percentage, given the high number of people on Facebook? Now maybe they did not provide the right incentive, content and enticement? I love tossing out stats without context but an average direct mail campaign gets a 1% – 3% response rate and Email on average gets a 5% click through rate.

Now for the good news, those that became fans, came to the Cafe 20% more often, referred the Cafe to friends more often and became more emotionally attached to the Cafe. All really good things, but it really does not tell us what to do. Were these clients predisposed to be the best clients? Is that why they became fans to begin with. If they were more likely to refer the Cafe why did the Facebook site only develop into a few hundreds fans and not go viral? I’m sure we’ll get these and other answer on the next episode of Taxi. But until then were left with what the questions, “What we do with a Problem like Maria Facebook.”